Abstract
This essay responds to the fall of the Sublime as an aesthetic of landscape, in the midst of an ever-abounding Picturesque. It ties an overemphasis on objective visual form and an eventual loss of subjective meaning to this fall. The history presented here is a sketch of how the Sublime has recast itself over the years, in terms of both its theory and its objects of representation, and in terms of its relationship with Picturesque theory and practice. Simultaneously, in an effort to restore meaning to worn-out forms of the designed visual landscape, the essay tries to reconstitute a sense of the Sublime in its own writing. Set amongst the history is a sequence of fictional descriptions which narrate the displacement of a Picturesque view by a Sublime experience. Thus, the format of the critique emulates its own thesis: it is in the guise of criticism that a sense of the Sublime (and its subjective meaning) can be restored to a current aesthetic of landscape architecture overly preoccupied with objective, visual form.
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